Thank you for joining, in this webinar, Milestone’s expert Erik Newton, VP of Marketing and Gaurav Varma, Sr. Product Marketing Manager discussed about SEO, local, Google My Business, reviews, images, and videos for the Property Management Marketing.
Key topics in this recap video:
- Home ownership down & rental share up
- Digital experience critical for most renters
- Organic search remains the dominant source of trackable web traffic in real estate
- Why SEO, local, and reviews matter in the property journey
- Google is the home page of all your home pages
- How GMB, reviews, images, and videos help real estate marketers
- SEO and website tips for real estate
Gaurav Varma
Today’s topic is real estate and Renter’s interest customer journey. We get several questions about if you are going to be sharing the tech in the recording. Yes, we will be sharing this after the webinar is over. I am Gaurav Varma and your host I am joined by my colleague, Erik Newton, Vice President of Marketing. Erik is a growth marketing executive with over two decades of experience in B2C and B2B marketing. Today’s agenda is a little bit about Milestone, some points on digital transformation, customer journey. Then we will focus on how Google plays a role in, in digital discovery and the whole digital experience piece of it. And then we will cover topics like online reputation reviews, FAQ’s some tips and tactics, and then summarize the key takeaways. Milestone is leading provider of software and services in the digital marketing space are solutions, voluntary categories, digital experience, which includes our content panel system schema and FAQ manager. Then we offer a digital discovery line of products, which is our local listings, product reviews, insights, analytics, and then our services lines of products. We have a root in the hospitality segment, but over the years, we’ve branched out and covered a number of different industries, including restaurants, retail, auto, finance, and technology.
So, one thing we know about COVID-19 is that it has impacted our lives, how we interact with each other and how customers interact with businesses. Research has shown that pandemics accelerated digital transformation by about 5-8 years in a short period of time from the real estate point of view, home ownership has gone down with economic downturn from the pandemic, however, surveys predict that two thirds of a property manager, landlords investors optimistic about the rental market rebound as it consolidates with government provided stimulus and policies like eviction, moratorium, and good news is that like any other industry, there is pressure to adopt digital services for better property management and client management. And that is where most of the opportunities exist.
To optimize digital experiences, data shows that organic search is remains the most dominant channel in this slide. You’re seeing that 63% of searches or digital experience is powered by SEO and local.
And that is where that is where we think you should start. Now jump into the renter’s customer journey, what motivates renters and all. And we will talk a little about that. So, a typically from digital experience impact perspective, you should be thinking of optimizing the funnel and if you think about the funnel itself, then there are three aspects of the funnel, which is the discovery aspect of it. How do you find, how do, how is anybody searching for a business, then the experience part of it, once they find a business, then how do they interact with it? And then of course, the closure or the transaction piece of it, the awareness and the discovery stage buyer searching for information set, which suits their attributes like family needs, jobs, city, or neighborhood, and the consolidate and the consideration stage they’re interested in, in interacting with the digital assets, essentially understand what is the pricing right for your amenities, right?
For you, product features and all that thing. And lastly, even they are buying, your product, then they want to know what reviews they want to understand. Application, processes, deposits, contracts, and all of that. So, your goal should be to applies all different aspects of the customer journey. And it is not just about one piece of the funnel. It is actually about the entire funnel to do that there are a number of tactics you can consider. So, on the awareness stage we recommend that you should consider things like social media and peer content using Instagram, Facebook neighborhood app, third party listings on Zillow and apartment.com. I guess many of you would be doing that in, and then, really honing down on the content on those on those channels, I have been a renter and then just went through the whole experience and middle of pandemic.
And I used a Zillow for my search, and then I was completely hooked onto all features and pretty much looking at all our details. Then from search perspective, Google, my business is incredibly important. You should be optimizing for the knowledge panel, local search, all that aspect. Website is a no-brainer. You must have a website and to, to showcase your products and talk about your company and, and then all rated features. And of course, to acquire new customers you can think about paid media, I think is interesting. I think it can be used at all stages of the customer journey. So, it’s just not about awareness. I just put this here, but essentially it, you can use FAQs across the customer journey. So also remember that brochures then on the consultation stage, think of brochures people, QR codes, for apartment search and all of those things, those digital experiences showing the whole showing experience of virtual tours, that’s the other piece when you’re considering align a product.
So, think about those things, even subscription programs help you, help people keep updated with all the features of your property. Also, you can send out offers on anything which makes the property attractive. Then of course, website is that is where you host all the, all the features of, of what you offer, virtual tours and all that. And of course, in local content, what is around the property neighborhood on those pieces need they all fall and sort of influence the consideration stage. And of course, on the conversion stage you should be available on phone call to discuss any, any questions you are not able to address digital assets and then chat services. I think he was again last questions about the contracts and things like that. They should be answered cancellation of leases. All those things should be part of your FAQ’s email follow-up systems in terms of continuously be in touch with your prospects.
And of course, reviews and testimonials. I have a slide which I’m going to show you in a little bit which will show you how important reviews are. And of course, offers and promotion. These are last minute offers which you can help in, helping closure of the deal and people are considering, if you want to start from the digital marketing perspective, there are a number of things which I showed you, and then there are a number of aspects from digital. And so, where do we start? We, we recommend that you should start on, on from the search experience. So, if you, if you read the stat here is that 93% of all online experiences starts with the search engine. So that is where it used to such a search as a no-brainer that’s where you should start.
The second piece of it is is the reviews. Basically everybody else’s revealing the reviews. And the funny thing is about reviews that people trust online reviews. Other people are, are whenever people reading other people’s reviews, they are trusting those reviews and making those decisions. And I was looking for my own apartment and it review we was on Yelp and pretty much Zillow and all the other sites. And then I was, then, short listed on the, on the apartment I’m staying in today with that. I will pass it on to Erik. And he is going to speak to you about the Google journey and then take, take it forward from that, I think, would you like to present from your computer?
Erik Newton
We like to point out that Google is the homepage of all your home pages, and this is even more true in the real estate market and the real estate industry.
If you think about, as I, as I prepared for the webinar and prepared the materials, I’ve just thought about how would I look for an apartment? Where would I like to, where would I like to live? What neighborhoods am I interested in and a popular query is a rent apartment near me that near me to style query, which means that you must be well optimized for local. So, what we see down the front of the page when we do this is a couple of paid ads in this paid out at the top has extension. So, this is a really covering up a lot of territory there and paying, probably good solid money to get those leads. There is a little bit of a smaller ad here, and they’ve done something clever here that they’ve included their phone number, which is a good idea. This is one of the extensions you can do on your ads. Then the next thing down the page is going to be the map, which gives people a visual, spatial alignment of where the properties are. And then there is usually what we, the local three pack here. And at the top of the local three pack is another paid ad. This is a different, it is a different type of placement that is, is available to us. And as we start to look here, this, these are the organic opportunities. And what gives you the opportunity to be here in organic is the number of reviews you have, the fit you have with the query, the location that, that you that your property is at, that matches the query. So these are just the first couple of sections that as you go down the page or you see there’s an aggregator, people who are listing multiple properties, there’s this section called people also ask.
It’s an interesting one Way to get a little bit more exposure when you might not have the most dominant website, but you have a really good specific answer to a question that Google knows that people are asking, and people can click on that. See the answer, see the question, see the answer, and they can click through to your website. So, it’s a decent way to get some branding and some traffic, as we see down here, these are vertical, what we call vertical search engines. So, you might be allowing, you might be submitting your property information to a vertical search engine, and you want that information as you submit it to be optimized for the same reasons, because the people searching there after searching on Google are going to be going through that same experience. Now, down below this one, we have something different that looks like people also asked, but it’s, FAQ’s this apartment list website has put FAQs on the page and they’ve probably, and they’ve used a schema markup, and that’s given them the opportunity to cover more real estate here. It’s about twice as big as a standard.
Something new that I saw as I was preparing for this is that related searches are showing up in the bottom like this. And this is relevant to us as marketers for a couple of reasons. It shows us the other types of queries related to the one we put in that Google is seeing. And this gives us some indication of how we could organize our pages and our content, our headers, and our sub-headers could address these things. And then all would also get picked up. So, there’s signals about what Google sees in the patterns of how people are looking for things. Now, down here after, kind of mid, mid lower page. I see the, I see the words I am kind of looking for Santana, Rosa, great, interesting development near my house. And if I were going to get an apartment, I would want to check those ones out.
So, if I go to that one, I can learn the name. Santana Heights is one of the ones. So that was an aggregator of Santana of aggregator of content that included Santana row property is one of which is Santana Heights. So now that I know that I can go back to Google. So, this is, this is what we call multitouch where people are doing multiple queries, they’re using multiple resources. They’re starting with social. They are hearing from friends that are looking at reviews. All these things are happening. And then you get to this page. And this is where we have more control as property owners, property managers whichever, as marketers and what we want to make sure that happens here is that we have the knowledge panel, and that knowledge panel is on the right. And the way you get that knowledge panel is doing a complete optimization of your Google, my business, to make sure that you show up well.
So, as I said, I’d searched for this particular apartment. And then then I’m seeing then Yelp Yelp comes into play. This is one, this is one form of, of reviews here. And then there’s four more other reviews here. There’s Google reviews there. And three aggregators of apartment property content and review information here. Plus, there’s the chance to ask a question and publish Google posts, which are a little bit like a feed and social. So there’s a huge opportunity in property. This is a massively, I think it’s one of the most local businesses. It’s the most location-based business because, I might, if I want, if I’m looking for a subway, I could go to the subway on this part of town or in this part of town. But when I’m looking at the location is so intrinsic to the product that is property, whether that’s commercial, whether I’m buying real estate, whether it’s apartment and Google is, very much oriented towards that.
60, 70% of searches have local intent and people, once they do a local search transact by calling or interacting or buying something from a business within 24 hours. So very powerful indicator of somebody’s readiness to do business with us. So this is the environment. So now we’re mapping the funnel to grow, showed us the conceptual funnel and the role that Google and vertical search engines and our content plays at the top and the middle of the funnel.
Now let me show you a little bit about Google my business, what it looks like. And as I said, there’s about 30 different fields that you want to populate in here. And so you, I’ve given you some instructions here on how to claim your business, if you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend you do, because if you don’t control your reputation in the market, then the community, and those could be residents and happy residents, unhappy residents could be publishing pictures.
They could be publishing reviews about you and you kind of don’t have, you’re not going to have a much of a say in that. You want to make sure you’re putting your best marketing foot forward. So, as I said, within Google, my business, and this is the first of several, of specific listicles that I’m going to provide. The audience is a claim, your listing fill in the fill in the fields, upload photos, and you can upload videos. There, there could be existing questions that people have asked about the property, and you can answer those. You can generate reviews. You can ask people, happy customers to review you. You could ask employees to review what it’s like to work, on the premises, happy employees provide better service. And you should start including Google my business posts as one of your social platforms. So if you’re, if you’re active on Facebook or Instagram, you can leverage that content right onto Google, and you need to make your nap name, address, and phone number perfectly consistent. So that Google, if in case there’s a property with the same name that Google knows the difference from one to the other.
This is what GMB post looks like for us, we’ve started doing this actively about a month ago. And so we’ve got 10 or 15 posts up there where these are usually branded searches. Usually people know, Milestone, Milestone, Milestone, Santa Clara, and they will, they might be looking for us, but this is a good way to get more engagement and to bring them directly into an experience on our website that is, relevant to that last post that they showed some interest in.
So from Google my business and we consider local part of SEO and website, we kind of, it’s, it’s largely integrated. And if it’s holistic, it’s better, but let’s talk specifically about some SEO techniques. And I’ll keep this kind of short. This could be its own webinar itself, but you want to produce as large a website as your kind of can, can manage investing. And so, think about a hundred pages, between your product content, your blog content, your FAQ’s, the more pages you have, the more of a content footprint you have in the market. And you want to be very mobile-centric. You want to be very careful about your mobile experience, and you want to make sure that you check your website on your mobile phone. Often when I do these webinars, I remember I remind myself to do this. I go in and find things occasionally, I find things that I want to adjust to make the mobile experience, right? Fast loading mobile website is critical. You should be two and a half seconds or less. And if you are slow on mobile, you’re just going to be losing opportunities from people who are driving around, walking around using public transit thinking, Oh, that’s kind of a cool building, but what, maybe I can find that building around here. Okay. There it is. Let see what, if they have units available.
FAQs are an opportunity Gaurav pointed this out that at the top middle and bottom of the funnel FAQ’s can play a role 24 seven to help answer questions from your prospects. Schema is not long tail schema is additional information that you can add to your content that doesn’t necessarily show up on the page. It’s content that you are showing to the search engines. And that information can be used to get very specific on long tail search warrants. So when somebody asks a very specific one, like is smoking allowed are cats allowed, are dogs allowed that information can be picked up by Google weather, even if it’s not displayed on the page. So if you added a hundred different criteria to the page, you might make your, your apartment or our property page too cluttered, but you can add that and make it available just to the people who are looking for it and bring them to that page.
And that will be, a satisfying query for a satisfying listing for them to engage with rich media. I can’t state enough. You guys I’m sure know this because it’s your business images and videos make a huge difference in property marketing. And I was surprised to see, as I looked down the list of people, we invited to the webinar, large companies, medium sized companies, weren’t investing heavily in images. And there was a number of websites that didn’t have images of their apartments of the units themselves, which was surprising to me because that should be the number one thing that people are looking for AMP is accelerated mobile pages. This is a technique and a markup for making your pages much faster. It’s Google’s preferred recipe for speed, and it’s fairly straightforward. And well-known, so it is recommended that you create AMP markups, so that there’s this faster version of your responsive mobile website E-A-T means expertise, authority, and trust.
These are some fun, fundamental pillar principles within SEO that you should be writing in a way that shows your expertise. You should show who your experts are. If you have them, that people who speak and people who are authors, people who are data scientists, people who have reputations that are kind of, people who might be seen on Wikipedia, you want to emphasize those people make them visible to the search crawlers. And I think it’s generally makes sense to make those people visible to your visitors who are consuming information, want to answer a question authority has to do with popularity and reviews and trust also on distribution and how many people are linking to you and what they think of you talked about GMB setup and controlling your knowledge panel. A lot of companies that I checked have a knowledge panel showing, but they haven’t claimed it yet.
So there’s just an opportunity for you to tell Google I am that company, let me prove it to you and then get control of the knowledge panel should also keep an eye on ADA standards. The, the ADA laws, the ADA regulations were defined, but how to conform to them has been evolving through the lawsuits themselves. So on your website and on your property, you need to pay attention to ADA. One of the big things that came up last year was PDFs are not particularly accessible to the people who are using accessibility technology to consume them. And they need to be modified a little bit and converted so that they are accessible. Those are a couple of things you need to keep an eye on for SEO and your website. If you have any questions about that, you can ask them into the Q&A widget and, or we can follow up with you on doing more of a deep dive on SEO and best practices and how we might be able to help. All right, so I schema is in the last slide, and this is kind of fascinating to look at how well developed the schema or the, the, the taxonomy, the, the organization of information to structure, information about apartments and properties and houses.
Is it a mature and kind of well-defined within the schema.org community? This is well-defined so that all the way down, there’s at least 20 different data fields that can be populated. And I, as I mentioned before, smoking and pets are things you might or might not want to advertise openly, but you can put that information into the schemas. And when you do this kind of homework, Google, it makes it easier for Google to understand the context and, and match your property of your specific unit to the the query that they see on their end. So you can see reviews, photos, map, videos. You can point, you can point Google specifically to each one, each where each of these elements are on the page, and it makes it much easier for Google and other search engines. It’s not just Google that users is also be being and Yahoo. And the vertical search engines will also be consuming this as well, the voice devices. So if people are driving and they want to do a voice query, because it’s not safe to type using, using, putting this information in schema and then doing a speak able schema around, it will make the information that you put here even more available to your prospects.
Lets switch gears and talk about FAQ’s. I looked through a couple of dozen websites on the invite list, and I was surprised at how few websites had an FAQ section., if you think about the decision that people are making where are you going to live and where are you going to work? Are the things you probably should have the most questions about? Cause it’s going to consume all 24 hours of your life between the two I just about. And so my first recommendation is add an FAQ section and put in the 30 top questions that people ask you and you and your staff know what these questions are, and it’ll be more efficient. And this, these answers in addition to helping people make decisions and move through their journey with you also make it easier for Google to decide that you’re a good place to send people because you’ve, you’ve published the answer to that question.
So start with your first 30 questions and then expand to 30 questions about the local area around your property. where are the places to eat? What are the events where, where are the great natural hikes and beaches, and where do people travel? And, what are the other activities in the communities like these are, these are things that people are going to ask kind of mid funnel, like as they start to evaluate whether this is the right location and property for me. And then add 30 more general questions about the rental process, leasing process, just you can be as detailed. , you can be as detailed in the questions as you want. The answers can be reasonably short, like 22, it could be a sentence to three or four sentences. Usually, Google is getting good at breaking this information down into very specific bites to help people find answers.
And while I recommended that you create an FAQ section, I’m also recommending that you take the same FAQ’s and put them on your content pages. We see that Google gives more visibility opportunities to pages and content that are marked up with FAQs with schemas on the page, because it is, it’s a very good experience in Google’s mind, because the question is in the context of the answer, like this is the property that, that, that satisfies that question. And that’s a, a good experience and Google kind of rewards that behavior. And as I said, there’s an FAQ schema markup. There’s a, how to schema markup. If you’re going to explain how to fill out a form, how to do an application, how to get through the approval process and so forth, you can use those schemas and Google. It’s a signal to Google that this is a well-organized website and it, and we see benefit of about 20 to 30% visibility and traffic when schemas aren’t done in what we call error-free advanced schemas.
Images. As I said, images, I think we, all of us have been a property. , I’ve been in the market for an apartment or a house, and the images were surprisingly undeveloped in the sites I was looking at. There was, it was kind of like, four or five, six images, a lot on the external, but the building itself, the property, some of the amenities, but I was really interested to see the, what the rooms are like in, is that enough space for me and my family, for example. So my recommendations here are 13. I, I will not go through all of them with you on this list, but we will be sending you guys the deck so you can you don’t have to take notes either, but invest in a professional photographer in, unless you have really good equipment and you have somebody who knows what they’re doing, this is going to be marketing material that you can use for years on your property.
And you want your pictures to stand out against pictures that are submitted by the community. So, usually photographers can be hired for a hundred, $200 an hour. And so you could get a shootout for 500, a thousand sort of sounds like a chunk of money, but it’s really nothing relative to an apartment being unleased, a thousand dollars a month apartment not being leased for another month or two, because that the prospect that you had on your page, didn’t see what they were kind of, it wasn’t swept off their feet by your photography. As I said, focus on all the units and all the rooms, the kitchen is especially important to people because the resident is going to spend a lot of their waking hours. The kitchen, I found that the kitchens were kind of under photographed, which kind of surprises me, I think, yeah, I would shoot the kitchen from looking into the kitchen and looking out of the kitchen.
Cause that’s part of the experience of like, what’s it going to be like to be in that in that unit? I recommend about 20 to 30 images that you should do. I recommend shooting in furnished rooms rather than unfurnished because it looks homier, lived in and inviting, but make sure to declutter aggressively if you’re shooting in there. So I wouldn’t have as many pillows and blankets and things. And so you want the room to look big and clean and bright shoot mostly in daylight. There’s some interesting techniques you can do with evening photos and lighted photos. But for the most part, I think you just use natural daylight is a, is a good advantage. My, my designer who has done thousands of websites recommends JPEG as the file format to save and upload in. He says, that’ll, that’ll work best. If you’re a little bit more ambitious, you can take drone shots. I looked up the price of drones, non drunk photographers. It’s about a hundred or $200 an hour. So you could probably do this for a couple hundred dollars. And it’s a bit of a differentiator if particularly if you have a kind of a good looking property and good looking, newer roof and the makes the neighborhood look cool. That that is a little bit of a differentiator.
One last thing, if you’re going to use an image carousel, or you’re going to put, 10, 20, 30 images on a carousel, probably want to put it below the fold and load the top part of the page quickly and then put it below the fold and then it it won’t slow down the page load. This is sort of a sequential or lazy loading style. As people engage, go down to that part of the page and engage it. You could load it in the background while letting the top of the page be visible. As I said, I looked through a lot of websites and this is a decent collection of, from one, one property and showed, a lot of the rooms within one unit and nicely furnished and it looks stage. It looks nice.
Video is extremely popular. I think we also see our, ourselves and friends and families consuming a lot of self curated videos from YouTube and Vimeo. And the, the key to video I think is to keep it short 90 seconds or less after that, they tend to, the video viewership tends to fall off. So if you’ve got a longer story to tell chapterize it and see you realize it into three or four or five parts and let people kind of choose the parts they want to consume rather than making it long. I think there’s an opportunity to add a video walkthrough and this can be a little more casual than a professional photography that you just have a good, really good quality cell phone, a mobile phone, and just what it’s like to go through the apartment. And I think the virtual tours are also virtual walkthroughs are popular, but I think the natural video walkthrough is is, was pretty appealing to me.
And again, you could do drone video as you’re doing the video and you’re thinking about the script and what the talk track or the things you’re going to show is what’s it like to live on the property? What’s the atmosphere like, think about the questions that people often ask as they’re making final decisions and create some videos that address that. So even for people a little bit shy to ask a particular question about, what’s the, what’s the social scene like around here, or, how’s the food, our deliveries, easy, these kinds of things. You could kind of show that it’s a great inconvenient place to live, and you want to load these videos onto YouTube and optimize on YouTube. Be real particular about the thumbnails and make sure that the title is readable at the thumbnail scale of, about the size of the silver dollar or so that you want the color to pop and you want the text to pop the title should be interesting , kind of engaging a little bit intriguing and you want to do that YouTube optimization.
And then you also want to bring your video links either from YouTube or from another video host to your website and optimize the page around the YouTube
That you wanna do that is because Google does host video thumbnails on the SERP results sometimes from YouTube and sometimes from the, the property domain sometimes from the the website. And so you want to leverage both, but if you use your YouTube links and you drive your traffic to one place, you’re sort of signaling to Google that this is a good video, that people are enjoying and consuming and liking and so on. If you have any questions as I go, you can drop them into the box and I can address them at the end. Yeah. A bit about video and virtual tours. I I didn’t see too many of these as I looked through the website. I it’s interesting and modern, but the, the movement was a little bit unnatural because I’ve kind of requires my skill to know how to move through how to, how to kind of walk myself around virtually. But it’s definitely part of the future to and embrace virtual reality, particularly when we’ve been in a pandemic that makes the in-person viewing feel a little bit risky and uncomfortable for people
Views critically important. As Gaurav pointed out in his in his data, 90, 90 plus percent of people look at reviews, 84% of people trust, reviews as much as their own friends. So you need to generate good reviews from your happy customers. I highlighted a particularly funny review there that got a one star. It said they get this is the place I was looking at. The Santana Heights gets high ratings by asking people to asking us to write right in front of them. They literally put the iPad in your hand to ask you, and that’s, that’s definitely being aggressive. And you, you hate to see the backlash from, marketers and, and staff making good efforts here to try to capture the good reviews. So you want to avoid incentivizing an arm twisting because if you say, Hey, they offered me $10 to write this.
So I’m going to give them a four star. You really don’t want that information out there, but you have to identify customers that are happy customers that are renewing, maybe a customer that’s gotten a discount, or you’ve given them an upgrade or a free month or some kind of advantage, put them in a good state that , makes them happy. And in, in the right frame of mind to write your review, that would give you that four or five stars, which is going to end up being really important. And you can, you need these reviews in multiple places because there’s so many of these vertical search engines that that are aggregating our content and reviews about us. So everywhere from Yelp to apartments.com to apartment listing, to Google , you can probably ask people to review you on two places.
But I think if you asked for more than two, it’s going to feel like a lot of heavy homework for people and they won’t, they’re not likely to complete it. If you make the ask too hard, so, short couple of sentences and , probably a better way to do this than arm twisting and person and saying, can you do it right here right now is to capture the person’s email address and say, could I follow up by sending you this link and have your staff on property or in the marketing department, send out those reviews, those requests for reviews. What I find is that if I ask five people, maybe get one of them to review. So it’s definitely a lot of work, but once you get, 10, 20, 30, 40 reviews, you sort of have a credible base that people feel like that, that is the community speaking back to them.
So I have analyze the property management benchmark, I’ve created a benchmark of what other companies are doing and what are the opportunities for the people on this call when people engaging with Milestone to improve their performance and their relative visibility, their competitors. And what I see is very slow websites. The biggest companies seem to have the slowest websites, some of the slowest lowest scores I’ve seen in the single digits. This is truly a problem in last year, and it’s going to be an increasing problem in 2021, as Google puts more algorithmic benefit towards people that have fast loading pages that provide an excellent user experience. So this average mobile score is quite poor. It should be, 60 in a competitive and good score be above 80. So what this means is that people are looking for, maybe they’re on the bus or the train going by a property, and they’re looking for your place.
They’re trying to get your website loaded. And it’s not that sort of score indicates like an eight, nine second load page load time. And a lot of times the problem is the images themselves. So while I said, use 20 or 30 images, you have to make sure they’re optimized and then down so that they don’t bog down your webpage load speed. We talked about advanced schemas. I do not see a lot of advanced schemas being used in in the sites that I looked at. So this is an opportunity to saturate the SERP and expand. And I, I, across all industries, I do not see a lot of sites using AMP and AMP.
Question: How do you determine your website load score?
Answer: So go to Google page speed insights, and maybe I’ll do it at the after I finished here, I’ll show you how to do it. And and you put in the domain and you get it out, all these different there’s about five or six different metrics. And the, the key ones you’re looking at are, how fast does it load initially? When does it become interactive? And so if you, yeah, if you look for that in Google, you can, you can find that that’s, that’s the best way to do it because that’s the, the crawler we’re trying to appeal to. And so we care about how they interpret speed. And the other thing when you do that search is look at what’s called the CLS. The content layout shift content layout shift is, is a particularly annoying on a mobile phone when things are moving around, and you’re sort of just start tapping things and you tap the wrong thing. Cause it’s moving because it’s not stable. So stability and speed both matter. And amps are a great way to solve both of that. All right.
Erik Newton
You would like our help in assessing your speed, your technical SEO schema, how your local’s doing your core vitals even your FAQ’s, if you have FAQ, I can have my team analyze it for you. And we can for 10 of the people here in the webinar today, if you look at that at that URL down at the bottom, you can request an audit, or if you’re in touch with your salesperson or the person who invited you to this webinar, or you can let them know that you’d like that. And they’ll, we’ll prepare that for you within, within about two or three days. And then we can present you those results and show you what are the opportunities for you to pick up pick up an advantage. All right. So I’ve gone through a lot here. It’s really kind of like the full funnel of marketing, like the five biggest kind of channels and opportunities that I saw as I prepared for this, but to saturate the serve when you do this by ranking, highly by using rich media content and using FAQ’s and schema markup.
So that’s number one, it’s got a whole bunch of the pieces within it, optimize your local profile, control your knowledge panel, get mobile, right? Make sure that you check that speed and talk to your developers about, Hey, we need to be literally, I’m seeing a lot of these sites take more than nine, 10 seconds to load, and you really want that to be one or two. You have got a huge advantage. A lot of the research that’s being published says that a one second improvement in page load speed will contribute in excess of 9% to your conversion and your kind of your overall generation of positive generation of results from your website. Get your, get your, as I said, get you to get your pages fast. Amp is a great way to do that. Optimizing your images another way. The other, the third biggest problem I see with speed is that there are marketing, marketing, widgets, and JavaScript applications that are loading in front of the content.
And sometimes these applications were put up a year or two ago, and the campaigns no longer running, but somebody didn’t take down the code. So these things accumulate and they bogged down the, the server’s response do the FAQ’s do 30, 60, 90 plan for FAQ’s in an FAQ section and on page get your images awesome. Do some videos, generate reviews, leverage Milestone, if you want some advice, or if you want us to help you do any of this, let us know.
